Introduction To The Usenet
If you know what the Usenet is and have experience using it, you can skip this chapter. However, relatively small number of Internet users know about the Usenet, even less are actively using it. Its popularity is far from that of the WWW. Possibly, this is so because the Usenet is not as easy ("point and click") to use as the Web. It is our goal to make it much easier to use than it is now and make it fun and valuable resource for millions of on-line users. Its potential is great. Every day, about 1 terabyte of data is uploaded to Usenet servers world-wide. This amount is growing exponentially.
Usenet Architecture
The Usenet, or Internet News is a worldwide network of news servers invented to facilitate discussions between people.
Internet News is not unlike public email. You can imagine a news server as a collection of public email boxes. Each box is dedicated to messages (articles) discussing a particular topic. Such boxes are called news conferences, or more commonly, newsgroups. Normally, names of newsgroups reflect what topic they are dedicated to and are arranged into hierarchies. If you have access to a news server, you can select newsgroups of your interest, read articles and post your own articles.
Usenet works in such a way that everything that you post to your local news server will be passed to other servers and eventually appear on every server that carries the newsgroup that you have posted to. So, other people will be able to read your articles from their local server. After some time, older articles are removed from servers to make space for new ones.
Some newsgroups are moderated. They have a few people (moderators) making sure that irrelevant or junk posts do not get accepted. Most of the groups are not moderated, but posting irrelevant messages or advertising is a very bad idea anyway. People hate it.
Although originally invented for text discussions, now the Usenet is very actively used as file exchange medium. People post files as attachments to their articles. There are special ("binary") groups that carry such posts. The Usenet carries a large amount of goodies, such as pictures, videos, music, software. Many people spend large amount of money and time downloading this stuff from the Web. Try using your ISPs news server. You will discover a very reach source of virtually everything. And this source is fast and free.
Every ISP provides their users with (usually free) access to a news server, exactly as ISPs provide you with a email box that you can use. This is a part of a standard service package. To use email, you need two things: access to a email server (email account) and a email program, such as MS Outlook. Exactly the same is true about the News. You need access to a news server and a newsreader program. You should be able to find information about news server available to you on your ISP information pages, where you find other information, such as your mail server address etc.
If you want only to participate in text discussions, then a program like Outlook or Outlook Express is sufficient. You can use it as a newsreader as well as a email program. But, if you would like to post or download multimedia items ("binary stuff"), you should use a newsreader that is designed to make it easy for you. Even better, you can use your Web browser and Binjet to locate and download binary files from the Usenet.
Usenet Resources
A news server is a relatively expensive thing to run. Given very large volume of daily news data that a server has to exchange and store, it consumes considerable amount of resources. This is why not all ISPs are taking full news feed or keep articles (especially in binary groups) for long. If you are dissatisfied with your ISP news server, you might consider using a commercial one. You would have to pay, but the quality of service is usually much, much better. If you want to download large files, such as music and video files, you do need access to a good server. This is because large files are split into parts when posted. Each part is posted in a separate article. If a few parts are missing on your server, assembling the original file becomes a problem or even impossible.
You can find a table of commercial news servers compared by various features here:
http://members.tripod.com/~newscompare/chart.html
You can also find a wealth of Usenet related information, including software, here:
Usenet is an incredibly useful and free source of help for almost any problem. Whatever question or problem you have, you can almost certainly be sure that someone has had this problem before, has asked the questions similar to those that you want to ask, and most likely received helpful answers. You don't even have to ask your questions, you just have to find the answers.
Google are maintaining a searchable archive of newsgroups. We highly recommend using this archive: